‘Zero K,’ by Don DeLillo

‘Zero K,’ by Don DeLillo

Thirty years ago, Don DeLillo reached star status with his novel “White Noise,” easily one of the most acute American meditations on death of the postwar era. With its famous “airborne toxic event,” and with its deconstruction of how disaster had become a pervasive part of everyday life, “White Noise” made a deep journey through the anxiety and paranoia surrounding the ways a postmodern America lives and dies.

That book was the product of a middle-aged, white intellectual writing about a middle-aged, white intellectual. Now that DeLillo is almost 80, he’s written another meditation on death, and it is as much a product of old age and the techno-utopian ’10s as “White Noise” was of middle age and the hyper-real ’80s.

Told from the perspective of Jeffrey Lockhart, whose sixtysomething, ridiculously wealthy father, Ross, is putting Jeffrey’s stepmother, Artis, into a cryogenic slumber, “Zero K” asks what happens if humanity conquers death, just as it has conquered so many other maladies.

DeLillo constructs his Central Asian cryogenic facility as something between a cutting-edge penal colony and an ancient religious sect. Buried deep underground so as to survive apocalyptic events (take your pick as to terrorist, epidemic or extraterrestrial), it is a strictly controlled environment filled with miscellaneous and aggressively purposeless details. There’s a Scientology-level creepiness here: As Jeffrey joins Ross to say goodbye to his stepmother, he’s outfitted with an anklet of the kind used to track released convicts.

The Convergence, as the cryogenic site is called, is a typically DeLillo non-space, at once moody and atmospheric, yet indistinct enough for him to fill it with dismaying absurdities plucked from our collective subconscious.

For instance, it somehow seems correct that during his peregrinations Jeffrey comes across two twins delivering a lecture composed almost entirely of portentous one-liners: “Will the missiles talk themselves out of the launchers?” “Does technology have a death wish?” “We will colonize their bodies with nanobots.”

In the site’s canteen, where they serve tasteless, colorless, textureless pseudo-food, Jeffrey makes the acquaintance of a monk who seems to be an elite member of this organization, and who inexplicably grants Jeffrey access to the site’s dark reaches. There is also a massive screen indiscriminately projecting a disaster porn of human chaos, carnage, mutilation and destruction — the obvious joke, which our author never condescends to make, is that this might simply be cable news.

DeLillo ably conjures a millennial feel — maybe these people really have solved death — and his observations on what happens when death is gone cut deeply. Once we achieve eternal life, perhaps humans will begin to long for their lost demise. And even if cryogenics fails to bring immortality, it may very well become “a promise more assured than the ineffable hereafters of the world’s organized religions.”

DeLillo’s meditations on this aspect in particular are important for a nation in which science has toppled religion as a locus of faith. The author is rightly disquieted at the prospect of a world where religion ceases to be relevant as a system for making sense of our lives and our exit from them.

DeLillo applies just enough details to make the Convergence eerily real, but not so many as to turn this book into genre fiction. At one point we are granted a tour of the warehouse, a chilling, industrial-scale necropolis of human bodies that may be alive, dead or in some state in between. Jeffrey is told that life at zero Kelvin will not be a non-life so much as a different form of existence entirely, a utopian, unlimited one unbound from traditional human ideas of body, space, time and self.

The Convergence is creating a language for those in the deep freeze, one that will “approximate the logic and beauty of pure mathematics” and that “will not shrink from whatever forms of objective truth we have never before experienced.” Artis’ first-person thoughts from her sleep — which, sadly, only fill a handful of this book’s 274 pages — are among the most interesting writing DeLillo has done since the turn of the century.

In the middle of this book, DeLillo quotes Thomas Browne, who reflected that there is nothing more depressing than the idea that humanity “is at the end of [its] nature, or that there is no further state to come.” “Zero K” grapples with the fact our demise is profoundly at odds with this aspect of us that yearns to exceed every limitation. Circling around this irreconcilable dilemma, DeLillo finds a vital dialogue with his great work “White Noise.” It is this, and not Jeffrey’s milquetoast characterization, nor the forced attempts to shove Middle Eastern terrorism and the Ukrainian revolution into “Zero K,” that makes this book a provocative success.

Still, one can sympathize with DeLillo’s efforts to insinuate terrorism and uprisings into a book that seeks to understand the perverse power that death holds over our imagination. For terrorism forces us to confront the singularly cruel possibility that we might die an anonymous, random death. And events like those in Ukraine make us remember that the societies we now enjoy only came about after terrifying amounts of carnage and destruction. Even if progress requires such gruesome events, what human would contradict Browne and argue that humanity would be happier accepting limits to our collective future?

But then again, the future that DeLillo shows us is one where the wealthiest 1 percent of humanity achieves eternal life as a severed head experiencing only the tiniest, Beckettian quiver of consciousness. A rightly horrifying prospect — it is hard not to join Jeffrey in thinking that anyone who does not find it horrifying is suffering from a serious malady of the soul.

And this may be the perverse, necessary thing that DeLillo brings to light in “Zero K”: So precarious do our lives feel against the never-ending nightmare of 24-hour news, so wedded are we to the idea that we can bend the world to our wishes, and so burdened have we become to consume so much in just 80-some years, we are now unable to think sensibly about the reality that it’s quite natural for us to one day die.

Scott Esposito’s most recent book is “The Surrender,” published by Anomalous Press. Email: books@sfchronicle.com